Biology Under the Influence

“In this major collection of essays, Lewontin and Levins range from the Human Genome Project and evolutionary psychology to Cuban agriculture. Throughout, their work is illuminated by an insistence on a dialectical understanding of biology from the molecular to the socio-ecological. In rejecting reductionist understandings, they offer important insights into how biology and science in general could be reconceptualized in the service of human liberation.”–Steven Rose, emeritus professor of biology, Open University, United Kingdom

Richard Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. He is the author of The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (2000), It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (2000), Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1992), Human Diversity (1982), and (with Richard Levins) The Dialectical Biologist (1985). Richard Levins is John Rock Professor of Population Sciences, Department of Population and International Health at Harvard University.